Here’s the traditional map used on election night to show the states won by each candidate (red for Republican, blue for Democrat).

But as Mark Newman of the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan states, “Looking at this map it gives the impression that the Republicans won the election handily, since there is rather more red on the map than there is blue. In fact, however, the reverse is true – the Democrats won by a substantial margin.”

Now look at the following cartogram created by Professor Newman that scales “the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes,” giving us a map that looks like this:

As Professor Newman points out, “The areas of red and blue on the cartogram are now proportional to the actual numbers of electoral votes won by each candidate. Thus this map shows at a glance both which states went to which candidate and which candidate won more electoral college votes – something that you cannot tell easily from the normal election-night red and blue map.”